Advertising is an essential means by which to introduce, promote and maintain the purchasing public's familiarity with new and/or extant brands. Advertising efforts typically include selecting a unique logo, displaying the logo to the public in a manner that associates positive product attributes to the logo, and maximizing the purchasing public's exposure to that logo. The more successful logos are typically unique in shape, size, or other features, such as color or texture (e.g., McDonald's™ golden arches, Nike™ swosh symbol, etc).
Advertising during broadcast events, such as sporting events, is one of the most effective ways to expose products and brand logos to a broad and diverse audience. The success of broadcast advertising has resulted in an escalation in cost, and this success is evidenced by its high cost. Advertisers typically have difficulty in evaluating the efficacy of money spent on advertising during broadcast events. Advertisers are similarly interested in conductive comparative surveys of exposure obtained by other advertisements.
Recently acquired habits and capabilities of television viewers, as well as new forms of advertising, complicate the efforts of advertisers and heighten the need for advertisers to independently monitor broadcast advertisements. Although the total number of television viewers continues to grow, viewers are becoming increasingly more adept at bypassing the traditional commercial breaks that typically appear at 15 minute intervals. The methods of bypass include changing the channel at the start of a commercial break or using a VCR or TiVo™ recorder to tape a show and then fast-forwarding past the commercial break. To overcome this new-found ability of modem audiences to filter their viewing by bypassing standard commercial break segments, advertisers are placing their logos and/or products within the show itself, either by logo placement or product placement type advertisements.
Logo placement is seen at practically every sporting event, where logos emblazon the walls of baseball stadiums, race car tracks and football stadiums, as well as on basketball court floors. Similar to logo placement, product placement not only thwarts the filtering efforts of the viewers, but has the additional benefit of more closely correlating the advertiser's brand to the attributes of a particular show (e.g., placing a bottle of Coppertone™ suntanning lotion on the set of the Baywatch show).
A significant drawback to product and logo placement is that advertisers must relinquish the control over the creation and airing of a standard 30-second commercial, leaving it principally to the show's producer to see that the logo appears within the broadcast in the correct manner, and for the appropriate amount of time. A producer may not always share the advertiser's focus on whether the brand logo is displayed in a manner that is visible to the audience. This relinquishment of control of logo exposure elevates the need for advertisers to independently confirm acceptable broadcast of paid-for advertising.
Verifying audience exposure to virtual logos is an additional challenge, since virtual logos can be inserted into a broadcast at any stage of production. Virtual ads are digital enhancements of event broadcasts, and although they are typically added to blank spaces on stadiums walls, they can also be used to replace another advertisement of similar size. Despite the fact that they do not exist in real life, virtual advertisements appear real to the audience. The advent of virtual advertisements increases the need to independently monitor whether a logo actually makes it into the final event, as broadcast to the audience. Utilization of virtual advertisements is in its nascent stage, and its use expected to grow significantly.
Ad-hoc manual scanning of a broadcast by an individual may be used to attempt to identify the appearance of a logo. Such a task is subject to human error, including distractions, subjective nature of the identification, etc., among other difficulties. The task of tracking virtual advertisements in a broadcast event is even more uncertain due to the possibility of sudden and random placement of a substitute virtual image either by the event producer or by broadcast personnel who may subsequently manipulate the broadcast image. Further compounding the task is the proliferation of television stations and broadcast events, multiplying the voluminous amount of information to be surveyed. People lack the wherewithal for minute analysis of large volumes of data, as necessary to survey an event broadcast, and tabulate the duration of every appearance of a logo.
Aside from the difficulties in relying on human subjectivity in locating the advertisements, the prior art provides no mechanism to tally the logo exposure time in a reproducible and non-subjective manner. Any statistical analysis based human-generated data will suffer from the inherent subjectivity of the evaluators. Moreover, alternating between the multiple cameras that typically cover sporting events will shift the perspective and position of the displayed logo, potentially causing an observer to overlook a portion of the logo exposure time.
There are numerous processes for detecting the presence of objects in a videostream. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,969,755 to Courtney, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference, describes a particular motion based technique for automatic detection of removal of an object in video received from a surveillance camera. Courtney divides the video image into segments and video-objects, which are identified in the segments by comparing a reference image with the current image, identifying change regions and tracking them between received video frames to provide updated position and velocity estimation of the object. Courtney and like techniques, however, are limited to detection of removal of an object. They do not provide a mechanism for detecting and analyzing logo appearance or placement.